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Particular College education, but primary education is a public good, and I think the people is support of affirmative action take the same framing and extend a position of what college ought to be. Even if not economically a true public good, college as part of education collectively as a public good, not in the "benefits the public way", but in a way that is somewhat more abstract.
(tbc this isn't actually my opinion)
Suppose one claims that water should be a public good, in the technical sense. In economics, "both non-excludable and non-rivalrous." However, particular water fountains and taps can't themselves be accessed non-rivalrous or excludable due to their limited availability adn disproportionate desirability or pressure. One solution could be truly truly treat water fountains themselves as public goods with completely even lotteries for access.
Another solution could be to maintain that 1. water is a public good, that 2. access to particular water fountains isn't, and yet that 3. laissez-faire access to water fountains collectively leaves access to the public good unfulfilled. They could make an argument that targeted affirmative access to water fountains is a tool for keeping the water publicly accessible, while allowing the specific taps to be excludably regulated in their availability.
I'm not saying this is correct or has no holes in it, but it is a way of squaring the abstract concept of education as a public good with universities not being so, without resorting to a 'good for the public' definition.
I think that if we buy this argument, the solution would be for the government to directly run its own public supply with 0 or controlled nonprofit tuition costs, the same as they do with the water supply and public schools, not subsidize the costs of private universities. If the government just says "every college student gets $50k towards their tuition" and applies this equally to all schools, then the long term result is that all colleges raise their tuition by almost $50k, because that's where the new market equilibrium lies.
If instead the government has its own free universities, then all of the fancy ones need to offer a better product with cheap enough tuition in order compete.
You can't just subsidize profit-maximizing companies and naively expect them to divert all of the extra money towards the customers. That's like trickle down economics fallacies but worse.
This wouldn't work either.
Adding a free college option means that a college education is the new high school education. Students will have to waste 4 (or more) years in another poorly-run government institution or be forever marked as suitable for only the lowest employment.
Billions of person-years, and trillions of dollars, will be wasted by low IQ people struggling over book reports while the labor shortage gets even worse.
We need to stop spending government money on positional goods, and yes that means drastically reducing existing spending on post-secondary education:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good
In countries with government provided free higher education there is a contest for limited number of places in specific programs. In Russia people who get free college are generally smarter than those who pay for it.
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